Cleanup of San Jose Creek yields squishy surprises

SAN JOSE -- For nearly three hours, Brad Hunt had been squishing around in the mud and muck along Coyote Creek, stooping every few seconds to retrieve another piece of trash, shifting each sodden coffee cup or soiled diaper into one of several bags set up along the creek bank -- like a forensic technician collecting clues at the scene of a crime.

"I think people don't really realize where their trash is going most of the time," Hunt said. As he spoke, a piece of clear plastic floated down from the tree canopy behind him, settling onto the surface of the muddy water. Guessing that it was discarded from a car on the Interstate-280 overpass nearby, he watched it float slowly toward San Francisco Bay.

Volunteers like Hunt descended upon a quarter-mile stretch of Coyote Creek Saturday morning as part of the city's Clean Creeks, Healthy Communities program, collecting data as well as trash. Styrofoam was the prize of the day because San Jose has been considering banning it for two years, and the City Council will finally put it to a vote on Feb. 26.

"This is a way of getting into the creek ahead of the vote to get some data about the types of litter we're finding," said Allison Chan of Save the Bay, one of several organizations that enlisted volunteers to assist the city's Environmental Services Department. "Not surprisingly, a lot of it is Styrofoam."

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After only three hours of work along a stretch of creek that a city spokeswoman allowed was "not a hot spot" for dumping garbage, volunteers pulled out 748 pounds of soggy trash, hauling away an infant car seat, a tire and a rich cornucopia of takeout food containers. Before the city banned plastic bags, Styrofoam and plastic bags each accounted for about 7 or 8 percent of the trash clogging local waterways. Following the ban, the city examined trash for a year and determined that the tonnage of bags had been reduced by nearly 60 percent.

"What that shows us is bans work," Chan said. "The more data we have to prove that, the better." An observer from Vice Mayor Madison Nguyen's office came to peer at the trash from the cleanup near Selma Olinder Park.

"We're confident that banning these substances results in dramatic reductions," said Cheryl Wessling, spokeswoman for the city's environmental services department.

There's a good reason for the sudden interest in Styrofoam, which city officials refer to as "EPS," for expanded polystyrene, because Styrofoam is a trademarked name. In 2009, the Regional Water Quality Control Board included Coyote Creek among 24 Bay Area creeks that violate the Clean Water Act for trash alone. A regional stormwater permit process requires cities to have zero trash in their creeks by 2022 -- and to show a 40 percent reduction by next year.

That deadline brought about a grant of nearly $1 million from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the Santa Clara Valley Water District and eBay to set up the Clean Creeks, Healthy Communities pilot program. "This program is a model of how neighborhoods can become stewards of an issue that affects their local creek," Wessling said. "Everything that happens in a creek winds up in the bay, and from the bay to the ocean. What's happening in our own backyard can become part of the great Pacific garbage patch. Litter is not just a visual blight. It's actually a pretty significant pollutant."

Richard Gehrs, who found the child's car seat, decided to volunteer after a recent bike ride in San Jose. "Recently I was up on Guadalupe River Trail by the airport, and boy what a mess it is up there," he said. "The water had risen up and all these trees were just covered with plastic bags. I thought, 'Boy, it's a good thing they outlawed plastic bags in San Jose.' I wasn't so in favor of the ban before that."

He's still not sure it's necessary to get rid of Styrofoam containers, but environmentalists pushing for a ban are convinced that even if people were more responsible about throwing them away, it wouldn't solve the problem. "One of the reasons we're focused on Styrofoam is it's a particularly bad actor," Chan said. "It's very lightweight, so even if it's properly disposed of in a trash can, it can easily blow out and then break up into little pieces."

But with a homeless encampment no more than 50 feet from where the cleanup was taking place -- and strictly off-limits to the volunteers -- there was an obvious disconnect between at least one source of the problem, and a solution.

"Our philosophy is, you can clean all you want, but if you still have homeless folks in encampments down here, you're never going to get the place really clean," said Chris Richardson, director of program operations for Downtown Streets Team, which attempts to recruit the homeless to clean their living space. "So we need to work on moving people out of here."